This invention relates to computer architecture and more specifically to a memory architecture for recognition and recall in support of a host system, such as a central processing unit and host system interface. The memory architecture is useful for real-world applications such as machine vision and real-time-noisy environment-multiple-speaker voice understanding.
Depending upon lighting conditions, a scene or structure will present distinguishable appearances. Fore example, a tree viewed at dawn, early morning, mid-morning, mid-day, early afternoon, and at dusk has a different appearance at each viewing, but it is recognizably the same tree. Not only do the direction, color, and intensity of lighting change, a myriad of changes to leaves, perhaps flowers, occur as well. Wind conditions may result in differing motions, may even alter the overall shape of the tree. But the tree is still recognizable. In order for this to be so, the perceptual mechanism must abstract a concept of the tree isolating those properties that remain the same and ignoring those that change. The changes may be large, e.g. lighting changes, or miniscule, e.g., change of position of a single leaf. Visual perception is one of many functions that require the ability to attend to just “essence” of things while ignoring unimportant aspects.
The General Purpose Set Theoretic Processor (GPSTP), described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 7,392,229, 7,487,131 B2, and 7,774,286 B1, is capable of supporting the processes for extracting an essence from data corresponding to visual perception input.
Applications such as machine vision and real-time-noisy environment-multiple-speaker voice understanding are required to accept a stream of input data (typically bytes) and to identify byte strings within that stream that satisfy a complex pattern. The input stream may be from external sources such as sensors, databases and communication lines, or from internal memory. Identifying a byte string in an external source stream that satisfies a pattern is called recognition; in an internal memory stream it is called recall.
Applications such as those mentioned above require both recognition and recall. For example, a sophisticated voice response system might be required to interpret vocalizations in one language (requiring recognition), then formulating an appropriate response in another (requiring recall). To perform such applications, a system must incorporate capabilities for both recognition and recall. Such a system needs an element for detecting byte strings that satisfy complex patterns; it should provide a connection between that element and external sources; it must incorporate internal memory of a capacity and configuration to support recall and provide a pathway between that internal memory and the byte string detection element; and it must incorporate a mechanism for control.